Learning Resources

You know who your learners are, what they want to learn, and how. So where do you find suitable learning resources, or materials?

Collections of Resources

You may be searching for just a small and closely-focussed interactive pack of materials, which you can adapt to the needs of your teachers or learners. This could be a "Learning Object". There are many places where these "Objects" are categorised and housed (aka "Repositories").

• EdNA provides a good starting point for searching some of these store-houses, which include Merlot and the Learning Federation.
• Victoria's "ACEBank" represents an attempt to enable teachers in the community sector to share their resources.
• Flexible Learning Toolboxes, part of the Australian FLexible Learning FRamework, may be bought whole on CD, adapted for your own use, or searched, downloaded and re-packaged as a series of small units (Link to Remix section).

Open "CourseWare"

In recent years, large institutions have opened up and released their content to the world. Two huge players are

• MIT (aka Massachussets Institute of Technology), who started the trend, and
• Open University (UK).

MIT make the point that their course materials are not the same as their courses, that online learning is complete only with a teacher. Stephen Downes compares the two in eLearnMag. (Open Uni "Labspace" appears to be a 'download-and-remix' operation for learning resources.)

Coming from the other direction is the WikiPedia foundation, with their WikiTextBooks, which anyone may create and edit.

Image: "web elearning app" thanks to Dan Zen at flickr